In the News

Today marks a very important event in the AI era. Ziroh Labs, a start-up company based out of Bengaluru, has launched Kompact AI, which will be a new approach to inferencing without GPUs and using conventional CPUs. The most important aspect of this product is that it can be scaled depending upon the need. For example, if you have a language model that you want to build for, say, 50 crore parameters, you can purchase a conventional CPU hardware of around 1.5 lakh and do the inferencing part of it. Of course, the training must be done in a GPU environment, but the inferencing can be happening here. Similarly, if you want to do a 700 crore parameter and probably a conventional server of 8 to 10 lakhs is sufficient. Like this, as we move from, you know, smaller language models as we scale up, we can also scale up the hardware and this is one of the most important contributions of Kompact AI. IIT Madras and the IIT Madras Pravartak Technology Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation of IIT Madras, were involved in fine-tuning and validating specifically from a performance and power consumption point of view, this entire model. It was today released and demonstrated to the public. I am sure this will have multiple use cases. Specific use case, as an example we can give, suppose the government decides to provide an AI assistance for, say, history students across classes. They can train the model at a central place, hiring GPUs. A trained model can be put in the schools using conventional servers with Kompact AI software layer and kids can use. So, for the inferencing part, we do not need GPUs. It is a very cost effective solution. Very importantly, this solution, in our opinion, will be a befitting answer for what we may term as the AI divide. Like digital divide was actually splitting a sector of population which has access to the internet and those who do not. A same type of an AI divide, where people who have lot of money, lot of energy will be having an AI solution, while others who cannot afford that will not have. Such type of a situation is something coming up and it has been discussed in forums including the United Nations. Kompact AI type of solutions, very very important to democratize AI and provide quality solutions which are affordable, accessible and also sustainable. I wish Ziroh Labs all success and this solution is not just for India, not just for our MSMEs, it can even scale to large industries and it is also for the entire globe. I take this opportunity to request some of the big companies, PSUs and the government to encourage this type of a deployment of AI so that we could have a very sustainable AI prevalence in the country. Jai Hind.